Movie review: Hathaway and Wilson do 'The Hustle'

Dana Barbuto The Patriot Ledger

Thursday

May 9, 2019 at 3:26 PM

To watch Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson do “The Hustle” is worth a few grin-inducing moments, but it’s rarely clever, witty or engaging.

For his first feature, Chris Addison (HBO’s “Veep”) directs a lame-brained script from four writers who craft a female-centric remake of “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” the 1988 comedy in which Michael Caine and Steve Martin played rival con men outsmarting themselves.

Hathaway (“Ocean’s 8”) and Wilson (“Pitch Perfect”) play, respectively, the high-class Josephine Chesterfield and the low-rent Penny Rust, a pair of swindlers who decide the French Riviera town they currently occupy is too small for both to practice their opposing brands of chicanery aimed at bilking dirty rotten men who “won’t believe women are smarter.”

Josephine, beautiful and diabolical, has been charming gullible guys (the “suburban white knight,” the “braggadocios on holiday”) for decades with such success that she now lives in a grand mansion in Beaumont-sur-Mer, where she practices her smooth seductions and hides her bucks and baubles in a safe. Penny, on the other hand, is newer to the game, and thus is rude and crude, picking up marks on trains with hoary tales about her “taken” sister needing to be rescued from sex traffickers.

Hathaway, adopting multiple European accents, and Wilson do well with their contrasting roles. While Hathaway is all class and charm, Wilson is a bundle of manic energy, gyrating and jiggling on the bars in her prison cell and crashing into doors at full speed. Like always, she’s a walking sight gag with her big blonde hair and oversized backpack and too-tight clothes. She’s always game for anything, such as the scene where she hikes up her dress to reveal an iron-glad chastity belt. But like so many things in “The Hustle,” the stars are shortchanged by a script that fails to tap their comedic potential.

It’s not for lack of trying. Penny and Josephine are frenemies competing over fertile turf on the sunny Mediterranean. That leads to a bet over who will be the first to wrangle $500,000 out of an unsuspecting Zuckerberg-like tech guy (Alex Sharp). Penny works solo, while Josephine has a team consisting of her butler, Albert (Nicholas Woodeson), and the corrupt local police captain, Brigitte Desjardins (Ingrid Oliver), who Penny calls “Captain Pant Suit.”

Wilson, the gifted physical comedienne with spot-on delivery and timing, is the clown to Hathaway’s straight-girl. With a better script relying more on the talents of its leading ladies and less on lesbian and STD jokes, well, the sky’s the limit.

Dana Barbuto may be reached at dbarbuto@patriotledger.com or follow her on Twitter @dbarbuto_Ledger.